Dell bringing Compellent features to mid-tier storage aimed at APAC
Dell has announced that it is launching a new mid-tier range of storage arrays, aimed at the mid-tier fibre channel market in the Asia-Pacific region.
Speaking to journalists at the launch event for the SC4000 range, Dell vice president and general manager of storage Alan Atkinson said that Dell's offering is aimed at the $25,000 to $50,000 market, and that the company is essentially taking its flagship Compellent product and dropping it down a notch in pricing — a move that Atkinson said is aimed squarely at the Asia-Pacific customers.
"When you look at the fibre-channel mid tier, this is the sweet spot of the market — 43 percent of worldwide fibre channel mid tier is in APJ," he said. "If you look at APJ's overall mid-tier market, 79 percent is fibre channel. This is a space where we did not really have a play at this price point before."
The first product to appear in the new mid-tier range will be the SC4020, a 24‐drive storage area network that can support up to 408 terabytes of storage capacity, occupies 2U of space, and makes use of software based on that found in the company's Compellent line.
"This is a 2U box, it is dual-processor, it supports flash, it supports spinning disks. It basically is a Compellent, or what you knew as a Compellent, in every way, shape, or form," Atkinson said.
As part of the package for the storage array, Dell is offering perpetual software licensing, which Atkinson claims sets Dell apart from its rivals.
"The model that was developed in the '90s ... is kind of the model that's become standard in the storage industry," he said.
"Which is right about year two and a half, your friendly neighbourhood storage vendor comes around and tries to sell you a maintenance contract, except they don't actually want to sell you a maintenance contract; what they really want to do is sell you a new array, and sell you the same software over again.
"That's usually the way it works. To my knowledge, we are the only vendor who really doesn't do that."
Despite the announcement of new products and positive outlook, the company only last month was reportedly culling 15,000 jobs worldwide. The company said that the aim of its voluntary redundancies was to optimise its business, streamline operations, and improve efficiency.
The company went private and delisted itself from the stock exchange in September last year.